Squeaked onto the Xbox Store just days before Christmas, The Last Dead End is a survival horror set in the Azerbaijan Republic city of Baku. It’s an odd release date for a kind of Deadly-Premonition-lite game, but let’s put the turkey sandwiches to one side and get stuck in.
You play Farhad Novruzov, a filmmaker and specialist in Azerbaijani myth. In a bizarre opening sequence, you’re flown from America by an old flame called Bahar, who has found an ancient tome in a local dig site. The book is completely blank, which makes you wonder why she thought it was worth shipping it to you over thousands of miles in the first place. It’s lucky that she did, though, as the book glows with ancient script as soon as you open it, and scrawls some portentous stuff about an apocalypse.
Not one to let it go, you head to where the book was found, and – coincidentally – where your mother was found dead many years ago. It seems that you are personally wrapped up in the plotting, and it’s down to you to avert said apocalypse. This mostly means finding wells in sites of historic interest, jumping into them (watching the deadly serious Farhad dive headfirst into holes never grows old) and emerging into a Silent Hill-like ‘Old City’ where spooky stuff goes down and enemies want a mouthful of your larynx.
We say that’s the plot, but it’s more of a guess than we’d like. The Last Dead End isn’t completely coherent: it has a habit of making huge plot leaps without earning them, like Farhad saying he is the Chosen One when he’s barely done anything other than tumble down a well. The dialogue is all over the place too; a garbled and mistranslated mess that makes sense half of the time but mostly serves to distract you. The Last Dead End is fully voice acted, so prepare to be hypnotised by professional actors giving the nonsense some welly.
The Old City is mostly just dark and underground, but it’s enough to make it clear that you’re not in Kansas anymore. It’s not long before you’re given an axe and a pistol, who become your companions for the whole game – we only found one other weapon, which soon ran out of bullets – and the enemies arrive soon after. These come in three flavours: some lurching zombies, snakes and crows.
We’d love to tell you that the combat is any better than the story, but it really isn’t. The Last Dead End is technically an FPS, as it has all the contents of that abbreviation, but the gun is one of the most ineffective we’ve seen in a modern game. When you’re not struggling with the twitchy aiming, the bullets do near-zero damage. Aside from some of the more chunky bosses and the crows, the gun is best left holstered, as the zombies move in packs and the snakes are too fast and small to effectively hit.
That leaves you with the axe, which – who knew? – is many times more effective than a gun. It’s a beast, but it plays by odd rules. Sometimes it will one-hit, other times it will take a zombie down in a few, and we still hadn’t worked out why by the end. Is it determined by where you aim? Are some enemies different from others? We’ve no idea. Whatever the answer, it’s all a bit splashy, as there’s a sweet spot where you can keep them at a distance and hit them with a reasonably large arc, but the feedback isn’t fantastic on whether you’ve hit or not. Regardless, you’re going to be moving in that age-old pattern of slash-retreat-slash-retreat.
That would be fine if the enemies weren’t constantly glitching. This isn’t occasional: it’s the majority of the time, as zombies breakdance whenever they come to a corner, freeze for no reason, and spawn out of areas that you’ve recently cleared. Kill them and they’ll windmill into the ground before melting into butter, presumably so you don’t get exposed to the clipping for too long. And don’t get us started on the crows, who are flying devils, impossible to spot and harder to hit, nibbling on your health just before boss encounters. We just ran.
Things get better with the game’s four bosses. You’re not following the same cowardly attack patterns, which is nice, as the bosses have specific weaknesses for you to exploit. They’re all classic boss mechanics – there’s the old charging boss who’s weak once he’s stopped, and a boss who duplicates herself so you have to identify which one is ‘real’ – but they’re mostly glitch free and they come with the reassurance of a health bar, so you at least have the feedback of when you’re hitting them. The exception is a werewolf-style boss who’s weak when it retreats (as the ancient writing scrawled on walls tells us), but we’ll be damned if we know what actually made it retreat. We bumbled through by abusing cheap bugs.
The Last Dead End isn’t only about combat, as there’s downtime between the Silent Hill bits where you are doing your investigation thing. This is where the title becomes a bit too literal, as it mostly involves navigating streets that act unwittingly like mazes, as you puzzle out how to reach your destination marker when no road seems to be going in its direction. If there were points of interest on the way, or if one road looked different from another, these might have been enjoyable, but they’re commonly disorienting and dull, which isn’t the greatest combination.
There are positives in these sections, however, as the city of Baku feels different from the locales we’re used to in gaming. It’s refreshing to play a game, let alone a horror game, in a real-world city, and see the culture, architecture and signage all reflecting it. It’s not exactly a graphical showcase, but there was a sense of place as we moved from restaurants to kebab houses, baths and ruins.
The folklore that The Last Dead End draws on is authentic too, which makes a difference from the T-virus and Pyramid Heads that we’re used to. A screaming banshee-like creature with long, salad-fingers is a particular highlight (if not actually scary; The Last Dead End is too ramshackle to generate a scare). On the flipside, a couple of the bosses have been drawn from Azerbaijani lore, like the Gulyabani, but have been used under other names in other games, so their lustre is lost. Still, an Azerbaijani-developed game, set in the home city of Baku and featuring their folklore, is something we would love to come across more. We are over-served stories from very specific cultures, and The Last Dead End’s Azerbaijani setting – when it shines through the various bugs and repetitions – is the game’s one saving grace. ‘One saving grace’ does not make for a recommendation, however.
Make no mistake, The Last Dead End on Xbox fails at nearly everything it attempts. It’s a shooter that has no effective guns, a horror game that never scares, and a narrative-based game that makes no sense. At a time when Resident Evil is getting its mojo back, it’s hard to find a reason to play something so rough-edged. The title of The Last Dead End becomes predictably appropriate: you’ll spend most of your time looking for a way out.
